Portable Drives from Seagate

Seagate has announced a pair of cloth-wrapped portable drives at IFA 2019 in Berlin. The white or black cloth covered One Touch SSD holds 500GB or 1TB while the One Touch SSD Special Edition has a cover in camo patterns themed red, green, blue or white and storing 500GB.

They are available in October and MSRP prices are $104.99 (500GB) and $199.99 (1TB) for the One Touch and $109.99 (500GB) for the One Touch Special Edition.

SwiftStack

An IDC report, “SwiftStack Stakes Its Play in the AI/ML Market,” is available and says a SwiftStack reference architecture for AI/ML data management is backed by two customers. It includes Cisco servers and switches, NVIDIA’a DGX GPU servers and SwiftStack’s object storage software.

One customer uses NVIDIA DRIVE, an autonomous vehicle development platform using SwiftStack storage It supports 1OB of data per car per week with 30 cars being tested.

Tsinghua Unigroup’s DRAM Fab

Chinese state enterprise Tsinghua Unigroup is building a DRAM fab, having signed an agreement with the Chongqing government to establish an R&D centre and a wafer fab for DRAM production in Chongqing’s Liangjiang New Area.

Construction is scheduled finish in 2021. TrendForce reports Tsinghua has created a DRAM business unit with Diao Shijing, former director of MIIT, as the chairman and Charles Kao as the CEO.

According to TrendForce a major problem faced by this Tsinghua effort is DRAM fab process technology. It has no external partner that can provide the necessary expertise.

Shorts

ATTO Technology is now shipping the new ATTO ThunderLink 3252 Thunderbolt 3 to 25GbitE adapter. It is optimised for extremely low latency and high-bandwidth data transfers and features the industry’s lowest power consumption.

Cloud backup and DR supplier Carbonite has a new exec team after its $619m purchase of Webroot with its machine learning capabilities. John Post is the COO. Chad Bacher is Chief product Officer, Hal Lomas is the CTO. Anthony Folger remains as CFO as does CraigStilwell as Chief Revenue Officer

Tabor Communications has a report looking at the suitability of Ceph storage SW in high-performance computing. Download it with registration here.

Chelsio announced support of the SoftiWarp feature of Linux kernel 5.3 by its line of T5 and T6 line of Unified Wire 25/40/50/100 GbitE protocol offload adapters. SoftiWarp is an open source software implementation of the iWARP protocol suite developed by IBM Zurich Research.

With it Any L2 NIC can now run the iWARP protocol and leverage Ethernet RDMA networking. Download a technical brief here.

French MSP Asema has deployed Cohesity’s secondary data converging DataPlatform for its own and customers’ workloads. Its using Cohesity to offer storage and backup services, having originally used NetApp.

Free of the lawsuits against and from Sony, Fujifilm is now producing LTO-8 tape cartridges.

An IHS Markit report says the market for storage equipment certified by the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) is expected to more than double from 2019 to 2023 as vendors move to offer new products compliant with the organization’s standards. Global revenue for OCP storage products will expand to $5.4 billion in 2023, up from $2.5 billion in 2019, according to the Data Center Storage Equipment Market Tracker report.

Scale-out filer biz Qumulo, which ships an Active Archive Storage system product, has joined the Active Archive Alliance. It says it has built-in intelligent read/write cache to deliver the performance needed for billions of files accessed by hundreds, or even thousands, of users.

StorONE today has become a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). StorONE’s turnkey enterprise solution is built with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, for DevOps environments with containers and microservices. This allows cloud-native business applications and traditional workloads to run on a single storage infrastructure.

Scale-out filer startup Qumulo is partnering with axle ai, with its AI-driven video media management SW, to provide media and entertainment customers with a system for storing, managing, and automating search of their content.

Digitimes reports China’s Yangtze Memory has started volume production of its 64-layer 3D NAND, fabricating 256Gbit TLC chips. The company is expected to grow its 64-layer 3D NAND flash output to 100,000-150,000 wafers monthly in 2020. It is developing a 128-layer capability.

Zstor now offers certified Azure Stack HCI solutions with the Mini Cubes as well as rack servers with the latest Xeon Scalable Gen2 CPU generation.